Scripture: Deuteronomy 7:3–4, 1 Corinthians 7:39, 1 John 4:10
“Can a Christian …?” The Questions Believers Ask
If you’ve been saved by Jesus, if you know that he died on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins, the number one thing you want to do with the rest of your life is to say “thank you” to him by doing what he wants. But there’s a lot of questions where you don’t really know what exactly Jesus wants. And so, you ask when it’s anonymous and when it’s safe, “Hey, Pastor Mike, can a Christian blank?”
I’ve gotten questions like, “Can a Christian listen to hip-hop music?” That was my question when I was sixteen. You know, it’s not exactly the most sanctified, holy stuff, you know, booty shaking, violence, gang, everything. Like, can a Christian do that? Or can a Christian listen to country music, glorifying girls in tight denim jeans and extra shots of whiskey at the bar? Is that okay for a Christian to do? Can a Christian listen to the new Taylor Swift album? Not exactly promoting the values of Jesus. What exactly should a Christian do?
And what about the shows and the movies that we watch? Can a Christian watch Game of Thrones with some of its scenes? Can you watch trashy reality television, Love Island, The Bachelor, as long as you’re using it to learn what not to do with your life? Can you watch Dancing with the Stars with some of the outfits that the women wear and the guys wear while they’re dancing? What exactly can a Christian do?
Can a Christian celebrate Halloween with its not-so-Christian origins, or Christmas, or Easter, sometimes connected to ancient pagan holidays? What exactly can a Christian do? Can a Christian get a tattoo? Can a Christian use birth control? Can Christians live together before they’re married? Can a Christian use IVF if they want to start a family? Can a Christian just watch church online instead of coming to the actual church? What exactly can a Christian do?
Two Easy Answers That Miss What God Says
There are endless questions that you have asked me as a pastor. And here’s what I’ve learned. The answer to almost all those questions is really tricky, because there’s two really easy things that you can say that aren’t exactly what God says in his Word.
I’ve noticed that some people, people who are really passionate about their faith, they take the teachings of Jesus with utmost seriousness. They know that sin is not a joke and that he has called us to live a holy life. I’ve noticed that many people like that are very, very tempted to use the slippery slope argument to say that Christians can’t do things that the Bible doesn’t explicitly say. Like because one thing might lead to another thing which might take you over the line that Jesus doesn’t want you to cross, sometimes Christians will use their own opinions and traditions to say, “This is the new line that you can’t cross.”
I actually had a college professor, one of my favorites, he’s in heaven now, and he always told us that Christians should not dance and explained why he said it. I can do my impression of him. He says, “Because, gentlemen, dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.” Well, if you’ve ever been at the club or high school dance, you know that sometimes it is. And so safer, he thought, never to dance than to fall into sexual sins that you can’t take back. It’s so tempting to, you know, think of the thing that’s going to get you too close to the line that you end up making new rules. This is really tempting for some Christians to say, “No, never,” because one thing might lead to another.
On the other hand, there’s other people, I would say, who maybe aren’t as like super, super passionate about the Word of God, who say, “Unless there’s like word for word, verbatim, a chapter and a verse, then sure, whatever.” The Bible doesn’t explicitly say that you can’t, and so they just go on their merry way. And what often happens is they haven’t thought things through deeply enough, and they end up stepping over the line that Jesus explicitly said that they should not cross.
I’ve learned when we ask questions, “Can a Christian …?” we really have to be careful not to say, “No, never” or, “Well, sure, whatever.” Instead, we have to really slow down and think deeply about both what the Bible says and what it doesn’t explicitly say. And that’s what I want to do with you today and in the weeks to come.
Can a Christian Date or Marry a Non-Christian?
We’re kicking off this series called Can a Christian? And we’re going to wrestle with some really big questions that require lots of your attention. They will not be fill in a simple blank. “I kind of knew that before you started, Pastor.” They’re going to push you, challenge you, force you to wrestle with different tensions. You’re going to have to bring all of yourself, all of your heart, and two wide-open ears so that we can know what God says and what he doesn’t. And I should have warned you last night because today is one of those days.
Here’s our question for today if you’re taking notes in your program: Can a Christian date or even marry a non-Christian? That’s the question I want to answer with you today, and as I’ve warned you, it’s tricky because did you know that Jesus never went on a date? Do you know that there’s not a long record of Moses, the prophets, and the apostles, like, online dating, Go Fish, Old Testament edition? In fact, the concept of dating, like two people spending lots of private time together, is about one hundred years old. Did you know that? For most of human history, that was not how things worked, but now we find ourselves in a situation where there’s no Bible passage. I can’t like do a word search on dating, that just doesn’t appear in the Scriptures.
So, what does the Bible say? What can and what can’t a Christian do? I want to wrestle with that with you today under three kind of main points. Number one, I want to look at what the Old Testament says, not about dating, but about relationships and about marriage. Then I want to look at what the New Testament says, if anything, about such situations. Then I want to get really practical with you and talk about what happens in relationships when you get connected, but you’re not on the same page. So Old Testament, New Testament, we’ll talk about today.
What the Old Testament Says about Marrying Unbelievers
Hope you’re caffeinated. Hope you’re awake because we’re diving into the Old Testament. What does God say to his people when it comes to relationships? Here’s going to be the shortest part of my message and the easiest, because God was blunt. The answer is black and white, and in Deuteronomy 7, here’s what God himself said:
“Do not intermarry with them” (the cultures that lived in the Promised Land). “Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods.” — Deuteronomy 7:3–4
God’s teaching for his children was black and white and clear. The answer was don’t. In fact, if you’re taking notes, “Can a Christian, can a believer in Old Testament times marry a non-believer?” The answer was you can’t, you shall not, end of story, amen. And God in this verse gave his reason for his blunt thinking. He says, “Because if your families get connected like this, they will turn your children away from following me, the one true God, to serving other gods.”
The Warning of King Solomon
And if you think God is, like, over-exaggerating, just read the story of King Solomon. It’s in 1 Kings 11 if you want to check it out after church. King Solomon, the Bible says, was the smartest man in all of Bible times. In fact, when he became the third king of Israel, God essentially gave him a blank check and said, “Solomon, ask me for anything. You want power? I’ll give it to you. You want money? I’ll give it to you.” And Solomon said, “No, I want wisdom.” And God made him so wise. God made Solomon so smart that the Bible says literally people traveled, like no airplanes, no cars, they traveled from other nations just to come to Solomon’s Q&A sessions. The answers he gave, the wisdom he had, the intelligence was unparalleled.
But do you know what Solomon did? He loved women. Romance was his Achilles’ heel, and he loved women whether or not they loved God. And once, like many foreign kings who had giant harems, once he started marrying and dating all of these women, they brought their beliefs into Israel, into his kingdom, into the palace, and the Bible says that Israel did not become atheist. It became polytheist, where any god would do. In fact, the Old Testament, in a sense, is the long story of like a civil war caused because of Solomon’s sin. People taken into exile because their religion got twisted. And where did so much of it begin? It began with a guy who loved his wives more than he loved the God that we were supposed to worship. He cared more about putting the smiles on the faces of the women that he could see than a smile on the face of the invisible one that he couldn’t.
And so, the Old Testament warning is clear. In fact, at the end of the book of Nehemiah, when Nehemiah comes back to Jerusalem, rebuilds the walls, and finds out that people were committing the sin of Solomon, he forced them to get divorced, “Your marriages have been unbiblical and evil, and they need to end.” And so, if this was two thousand years ago, I would say, “You can’t. Amen. Let’s stand and pray.” But this isn’t the Old Testament, obviously. We have to move to part two, which is what exactly does the New Testament say?
What the New Testament Says about Dating and Marriage
If you’re new, this might be a bit over your head. But Christians today follow the commands of the New Testament and not all the commands of the Old, because that’s what the Bible tells us to do. Some of the things that God said were just for his Old Testament people before Jesus came. That’s why we don’t have animal sacrifices in church. That’s why we don’t always have to go to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover every spring. That’s why dudes can shave instead of growing big Jewish beards. Those things are in the Old Testament, but they don’t apply to us today.
So, we really need to ask ourselves the question, what exactly does the New Testament say about dating, relationships, and marriage? Is it as blunt and black and white as the Old Testament was? And the answer is … that’s the answer. It’s so tricky. It’s so difficult. There is no Deuteronomy 7 in all of the New Testament. There’s no passage that you can just quote chapter and verse, say, “Well, there it is. That’s what God wants me to do.” And so, Christians have to wrestle with some pretty difficult scriptures to interpret.
Does “Unequally Yoked” Apply to Dating?
Some of you maybe have heard of the phrase that a Christian should not be “unequally yoked” to an unbeliever. Have you heard that before? If you Google it, “Can a Christian marry a non-Christian?” I guarantee that phrase would come up almost as the first result. The problem is, where that phrase comes from has nothing to do with relationships. The Bible does say that Christians should not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. That’s from 2 Corinthians 6, and it’s not about marriage at all, it’s about worship. The phrase “unequally yoked,” the Greek word used there, is never used in any place in the New Testament to refer to relationships. And as far as I could tell, never used anywhere in all of Greek to refer to romantic relationships. It’s a bad application of that chapter.
“Only in the Lord”: What 1 Corinthians 7:39 Means
What is more, perhaps, applicable is not 2 Corinthians 6, it’s what we find in 1 Corinthians 7. 1 Corinthians 7 is a really, really long chapter where the apostle Paul is teaching a first-century church about marriage, about singleness, about sex, about remarriage, like all things relationships. And at the very, very end of that long chapter, the apostle Paul says a really important thing. He says this:
“A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord.” — 1 Corinthians 7:39 ESV
Now, some of you noticed I just quoted the ESV, the English Standard Version. I did that because this is like a literal translation of what Paul originally wrote in the Greek, that last phrase, “only in the Lord.” Christians have debated, well, what does that mean? Some people think what Paul is saying is that a woman whose husband has died can marry whatever guy she wants, but that guy has to be in the Lord. The NIV translation takes it in that direction. It translates, “he must belong to the Lord.” That could be what God means, or it could be a more general statement that when a woman remarries, her thought process has to be in the Lord. That she can’t say, “Well, here’s my faith life over here when I think about the Lord, but here’s this relationship life over here where I’m not thinking about that.” He’s saying she can marry whoever she wishes, but she has to be thinking about God the whole time that she does it.
Pastor Mike’s Answer: You Can, but Be Careful
Because there’s no Deuteronomy 7 in the New Testament, and because passages like 1 Corinthians 7 aren’t exactly clear, I’ve come to this conviction about interfaith dating. If you push me, “Pastor Mike, can I? Can I grab coffee with this guy? She wants to get married. Is this even a possibility for me?” If you said, “Mike, you are not allowed to add a single thing to the Bible just to play it safe, and don’t subtract a single thing from the Bible just because you don’t want to hurt my feelings. What’s your pastoral … what’s your biblical answer to this question? Can I?” Here’s my answer, you can, but be careful. You can, but be so careful. Can I find a passage in the New Testament to tell you, “You can’t. You’re sinning. You have to stop. You’re living an unrepentant lifestyle”? I can’t find something that clear, but I can find a whole bunch of things that tell us if you do, if you get that close to someone who will have that much influence in your life, you will have to be so, so, so, so, so, so careful. Can you fall for him, can you marry her and still love God the most? That’s the question.
When You’re Not on the Same Page Spiritually
So, let’s get practical. The last thing I want to talk to you today is, you know, what happens in real life when we are in these situations? And I want to wrestle with that because I have a hunch that a whole bunch of you here today are right now in that situation. Like some of you are both like running after Jesus with all of your heart. Some of you are just coming to church because you fell in love with someone who’s passionate about church. I have a hunch if we raised our hands, there would be dozens of you here today who say, “You know, we’re not totally on the same page just yet. We’re trying to figure this out.” So, let’s talk about that.
I want you to imagine for a second that I have a man and a woman up here on stage, and they’re not just good friends who happen to be like standing next to each other. They’ve held hands, which will represent a romantic connection. Once that happens, once they’re connected in a serious relationship, three things can happen I want to talk to you about.
“Solomon the Sequel”: When a Relationship Pulls You Away from Jesus
The first one is by far the worst one. It’s what I call “Solomon the Sequel.” It’s where someone, this could be the guy or the girl, who’s not running after Jesus, but moving away from Jesus, thinking things that Jesus doesn’t agree with, they’re influencing in small ways or in big steps their significant other to not live the life that God wants them to live. How does this work? Well, let me say she’s the Christian and she comes to church every single Sunday, and then she gets serious, dates, even marries a guy who really isn’t into coming to church every single Sunday. In fact, he doesn’t really think it’s that important. So, he’s making plans for the weekend. He wants to sleep in on the weekend. He wants to go away for the weekend. And now because she really wants to make her husband happy, she gets pulled in little directions. And now I only see her when I’m preaching two Sundays out of every four. Just like Solomon, her heart has been shifted. She’s tried to make a human happy even if it makes the Most High God sad.
I have to tell you, if you put yourself in this situation, be so careful, because this is the worst sin. What is the worst sin you could possibly commit? And the answer is telling Jesus he’s not worth it. Whatever you do, the worst thing you could ever do is to say, “Thanks for dying for me, Jesus, but I have to make this woman happy.” It’s to imply or to state with your priorities that you would rather disappoint the King of kings and Lord of lords just so your spouse wouldn’t be moody with you. Literally, the worst sin you could ever do is to put Jesus in second place. And if you’ve ever been in a romantic relationship, you know that relationship means so much. It’s not just another friend. It’s not just your second cousin. It’s someone you want to make happy so deep in your heart. This is what happened to Solomon. If the smartest man in the world did the dumbest thing in the Bible, you all better be so careful. It can happen to you. It’s happened here countless times.
The Tension of Not Sharing the Same Faith
Or maybe by the grace of God, the Christian doesn’t get pulled away. There’s another thing that can happen to you in a relationship. You’re holding hands, except now there’s this tension. Let’s say you’re the Christian and you’re trying to move into the direction of Jesus. You want to grow in your faith, but you’re with someone who’s like fighting you. And maybe they’re not pulling you away. Maybe they’re letting you do the thing that you want to do, but you’re not just friends anymore. Like you’re connected. How you spend your time and energy will affect them. And so, there’s this just like constant, “We’re not on the same page with the stuff that matters most.” It’s when you’re trying to be winsome and say, “Hey, you want to come to church? The pastor’s offering this new class. I think it would answer so many of the questions you had that were never answered when you were a kid.” And then you have kids. “Where did we come from, Mommy?” “God made us.” “What happens when we die, Daddy?”
These are things you don’t think about when the endorphins are popping and you’re falling head over heels for someone, but there are literally generations who will have to answer life’s biggest questions. What happens when you don’t have the same answer? What will you teach your children about life and death, about heaven, hell, about what it takes to be with God and what separates us from him forever? Can you speak the truth to those little ones that you love if it’s their own mother or father who’s not on the same page? And so, if you go down this road, you just need to go eyes wide open. Maybe the relationship is amazing. Maybe the other parts of it make up for it in your mind. It is a possibility. You can, but just be careful that you don’t dodge some of the biggest questions that sooner or later every one of us has to answer.
When Romantic Love Leads Someone to Jesus
Or maybe a third thing happens. Maybe you moving in the direction of Jesus brings them in the direction of Jesus. Maybe the person who first came to our church just because they thought she was beautiful and he was charming, they stumble across something that they never were even searching for, the love of God through his Son, Jesus Christ. A study back in 2024 said that for one in seven Christians, their first and strongest connection to the church and eventually to Jesus was a significant other. It was a girlfriend, it was a boyfriend, it was a husband and a wife. They weren’t trying to drag them away from the cross. They just didn’t know. They just didn’t have their questions answered. And sometimes all it took was that relationship to let their guard down, and God did an amazing thing in their hearts.
This happens to so many of you. As I look around this room, I think so many of you were or are in this boat, and it is such a beautiful thing when you followed romantic love into a place like this and you discovered there’s even a kind of love that’s better than that. There’s the kind of love that we all ache for, a truly unconditional love, a love that doesn’t come and go, a love that truly is for better and for worse, a love that sees you at the bottom and lifts you up to the top, a love that always has time for you, never runs out of compassion for you, and has promised that it will never leave you and never forsake you.
The Greatest Love: God’s Love for You in Jesus
Maybe through a romantic relationship, you discover these words from 1 John 4:
“This is love”—not two kids falling for each other, not online dating, not even the way you feel about God. No. “This is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” — 1 John 4:10
God loved us. He saw how easy it was for us to forget about him, to deprioritize him, and he still loved us. And God knows everything about you. You can’t create some dating profile and leave out the bad parts. He knows all of it, and yet he loved you. He saw the ugliest spiritual pictures of you, and he loved you so much, get this, he sent his Son, Jesus, as a sacrifice to pay for your sins.
This is the kind of love that all of us have been searching our whole lives for, a love we don’t have to hold our breath about, a love we don’t have to, “He loves me, he loves me not.” It is just there and constant, the same yesterday and today and forever. One of the best things about being married is thinking the love that Kim and I have for each other is nothing next to nothing next to the love of God. The way I feel about this woman, it is 1% of 1% of the way that God feels about me, and that blows my mind. The sacrifices I try to make to make my wife happy are just a tiny, tiny glimpse of the greater sacrifice that our God made many years ago to make us eternally happy.
I mean, I want you, and maybe if you’re just here because of the girl or the guy next to you, I want you to know that there is a better love. It’s a love that you need. It’s a love that saves, and it’s a love that’s yours. God so loved the world, including you, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in that Son, Jesus, will not perish but have eternal life. Friends, I refuse to add to the Bible just to play it safe, and I won’t subtract from the Bible just to be soft. Today I will just say, whatever you choose, whoever you date, do it in the Lord, and may we all find the greatest love that this world has ever known.
Let’s pray.
Oh God, I thank you we’re here today. I don’t know what brought all of us through the doors, but you have us here for a purpose. You want us to hear of a better family, of a better bride, of a better groom, of a better celebration, of a better wedding feast, the one that we have in Jesus. May that stir our hearts so much, God, that we will live for you. We will disappoint the people we care about most for the sake of honoring you, and we’ll believe that we don’t need anyone if we have you. God, let that be the conviction of our hearts so we can make wise, good, and humble decisions today.
I thank you for everyone that you brought to Jesus through a relationship. God, it can be messy, and it doesn’t always work out, but I think of my dad today. I think of the man who never prayed with me for most of my life until you wore him down with your relentless love. I thank you for the patience and endurance of my mother, who walked faithfully with you and raised me to know Jesus, and I thank you that the Holy Spirit worked in wondrous and mysterious ways to bring my father to Jesus, too. God, for anyone who’s in the boat my dad used to be, bring them to the place where he is now, a Jesus-believing, Bible-reading, prayer-praying child of God. God, you can do this. Keep us all closer to Jesus and use anything and everything to get us to the love that matters most. We pray this all in the name above every name, in the name of our King of kings, Lord of lords, the one who calls himself the groom of this church. In Jesus’s name we pray, and all God’s people said, amen.
